Facebook to spend $200,000 a year to have a cop patrol near its headquarters

With five unanimous thumbs up, officials on Tuesday agreed to let Facebook foot the bill for a full-time sworn police officer to work out of a substation near the social media giant’s new campus. Menlo Park police Chief Robert Jonsen called it a “benchmark in private-public partnerships” that will result in a highly visible patrol in the Belle Haven neighborhood, an area that has a lower socioeconomic status than the rest of the city and a higher crime rate.

Facebook spent millions as part of the move to its revamped headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and now it plans to shell out a little more for the city to hire another police officer. The company offered to spend $200,000 a year for at least three years on a full-time beat cop, a proposal that was unanimously accepted by the city this evening. As reported by NBC earlier, that officer’s job won’t be to protect the company’s headquarters, which has its own private security personnel; nor will they be responding to local city emergency calls. Instead, the proposal calls for the officer to patrol schools, and be stationed in a newly-created neighborhood police substation nearby.